How Professional Models Are Made (Very Satisfying)

i'm on my way to a place called presentation studios international it's a professional model shop here in chicago where they make all kinds of models for all kinds of clients including architects and developers but they also make models for films and sometimes even court cases for the jury to understand the space of an alleged crime if you're new here my name is stuart hicks and i teach lecture courses and design studios at the university of illinois at chicago i'll be meeting a couple people over there at psi to talk about what they do the first up is robert becker he's a friend and architectural designer with a practice here in town and he used to work at psi before going on to graduate school and he'll show us around to be able to break down just how the professional model shop thinks about models differently from how architects do hey welcome to psi come on [Music] [Music] a few examples of some of the models that they make here at psi um they kind of kind of vary and scale and type i mean we'll do we have kind of a variety of clients a lot of work for architectural offices so if they need a massing model or something for a competition they'll do kind of acrylic model like this or kind of these smaller scale models which are typically usually done within kind of a few days or a few weeks and then there's a kind of model like that in the corner that's of a tower that was probably most likely built for a marketing office at psi the the job of the model maker is typically at least in this context for this model is to create an exact uh replica of a building and so it's designed almost exclusively as a persuasive tool um to convince a client or a developer or a potential buyer to actually invest in in the architecture itself yeah i guess model making is more about staging to the model maker than it is about the kind of the object mainly because you know how are you going to represent the building at a smaller scale how much context are you going to show what scale is it going to be displayed at where is it going to be displayed how are you going to light the model is the model going to kind of come apart into pieces to reveal maybe other aspects of the design or kind of show something else but obviously you know everyone's got a dremel of a bunch of different kinds of knives scissors um three or four different kinds of tweezers that are you know different shapes for different uses paint brushes it's like a dental probe basically like saw that's the 4x4 laser cutter [Music] which is nitrogen assist i don't actually know exactly what that does this is this is an important tool actually is the light and magnifying glass because a lot of the work you do super detailed so you need the magnifying glass to kind of see exactly what you're doing here is their paint booth which you can fit a car in it's huge and a panel saw which makes it really easy to cut down larger pieces of acrylic and then this room is the machine room so they have a handful of different kinds of cnc machines it's like operating a spaceship but not everyone at psi goes on to become architects some have a love and passion for models and model making that keeps them in the craft now that we've had a look around the shop we can get a sense of what the process is like to build a model from start to finish from a lifelong model builder hi my name is martin chadwick i've been doing architectural model making for uh more than 40 years now this is like the the kind of process that we go through client will send a rendering which i will look at and he will send samples and then i will do a mock-up like this so that's a typical mock-up and then i will either send that to the client or take photographs and they can approve it and this project um is uh three towers that are going in nashville tennessee and this is actually going to be like a traveling model where the developer can take this round to various clients to actually sell his property and so we tend to get all our drawings by the architects i get a three-dimensional um cad file like this and then i literally take that apart and so then i will do some elevations like this and i will literally send that across to the laser where it will actually cut out those piles [Music] okay so i've got my material on the bed um this is uh some frosted mirror right now so the first process is going to start to do all the scoring where it would show all the joint lines in the material so this is the second layer so the first layer is the scoring second layer is the windows and then the third layer will be the final cutout [Music] there it is that's the final piece so then if we go back to the model so then the actual scoring gives you a surface so then i would take that that surface off [Music] take the backing off and then i would actually miter the piece but that has got a mitered edge so then it would join this piece here so then that literally goes on the building like that and then it's pretty much constructing it like um like a real building really we build a core with a slotted floors and then these floor plates goes on the core and then it's the case of putting in the columns and then it's literally cladding it and this will eventually have a light strip in there of leds that will light up the whole building so this is the base um it's going to have a battery pack in here and there's these buttons here and it'll light up each individual building while martin is a very talented model builder it seems like he might be cursed every model that's still in the shop has some tragic story otherwise it would be off in the hands of its happy owner and it seems that a vast majority of the models still lingering around the shop are martins this was the elysian hotel in chicago i originally built this marketing model it does light up um i finished this model we sent it for a big opening party and a week later it came back and they said can you just cut it in half and add 10 more stories that um is not a reality so we literally had to start the whole thing again and rebuild the whole models apparently it was like right before the great recession and everything stopped and uh this this this scheme got shelved this was a supposed to be a gift to um to try and get them to sell up to buy the building and um they literally signed the dotted line before this one was ever delivered so they didn't need it they literally the developers went bankrupt before i finished it and it's about 95 finished and again it never left the workshop and this one was actually for a court case but they settled out of court before it left the workshop so it was never used making models can be big business i'm told here at psi that they've created models that are worth upwards of a million dollars and it took a bunch of people many months to create if not years to build it makes sense that making something so extensive would cost so much but it's also pretty mind-blowing to that people would spend all this kind of money on a model but as robert pointed out to me some of the building designs that are passed through this shop they would never have been built without a model because no one would have bought it without this beautiful and tangibly scaled representation to show how wonderful it would have been so for them it makes perfect financial sense to pre-build the building as a model and i'm glad it does because models are beautiful and fascinating constructions in their own right thanks to everyone at psi for letting me nose around and to robert and to martin if you enjoyed this video you might enjoy some of these others especially the one about how models are used in firms from across the world see you over there

Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 329,371

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture theory, stewart hicks, architecture talk, architecture course, architectural model-making, models, architectural case studies, architecture tutorial, model making, adam savage

Id: UoTjji7VQp8

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021